ABSTRACT
Cultural/social anthropology is the dominant subfield, and is concerned with the description and analysis of contemporary societies and the underlying patterns of human behavior, past and present. Many scholars credit the Greek historian Herodotus, who studied Egyptian and Persian civilizations, as the founder of anthropology. The name of the discipline is derived from the Greek, anthropos, and human, and logos, account, conveying the efforts to describe and to explain the regularities in human behavior. There is general agreement among social scientists about the definition of anthropology. The field of anthropology was originally conceived of as a single field although currently the discipline is usually divided into two major spheres, cultural/social anthropology and physical anthropology. Linguistic anthropology involves the study of the nature of language, relationships among human languages, and the history, development, and structure of languages. The connection with history has been a close one because anthropology was originally based on an evolutionist perspective.
